For the "superior morality" of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness ...to deny that this "superior morality" is properly rather an "inferior criminality" produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has e...ver tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a... real loser--in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Such indeed is the superior longevity of the fair females of Surinam, compared to that of the males (owing chiefly, as I said, to ...their excesses of all sorts) that I have frequently known wives who have buried four husbands, but never met a man in this country who had survived two wives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed on cod's heads! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human ...head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it,--coming to such an end! to be craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Though of erect nature, man is far above the plants. For man's superior part, his head, is turned toward the superior part of the ...world, and his inferior part is turned toward the inferior world; and therefore he is perfectly disposed as to the general situation of his body. Plants have the superior part turned towards the lower world, since their roots correspond to the mouth, and their inferior parts towards the upper world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than ...forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be ind...ulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »